page_title: Society for Human Rights
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Society for Human Rights / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: This 1880s block-long planned community maintains a remarkable degree of unity. Although the Old surrounding neighborhood has well more than its share of party walls, few of its streets were built by a single hand -- and the others were built a century hence, by which point architecture had declined considerably as an art. Its beguiling intimacy is deceiving: neighboring streets are narrower still, but have lower buildings, fewer trees, and even smaller front yards. AIA Guide gives dates as 1885 (rowhouses) to 1895 (apartments), with the buildings facing Wells and North Park arriving in between. Developer and dad Daniel F. Crilly named the apartment houses after his children, with their then-trendy names: Isabelle, Oliver, Edgar, and Erminie.
context_page_description: The Society for Human Rights was an American LGBT Rights organization established in Chicago in 1924. Society founder Henry Gerber was inspired to create it by the work of German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. It was the first recognized gay rights organization in the United States, having received a charter from the state of Illinois, and produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom. A few months after being chartered, the group ceased to exist in the wake of the arrest of several of the Society's members. Despite its short existence and small size, the Society has been recognized as a precursor to the modern gay liberation movement.
context_section_description: Henry Gerber and the Society for Human Rights serve as direct links between the LGBT-related activism of the Weimar Republic and the American homophile movement of the 1950s. In 1929, a young man named Harry Hay was living in Los Angeles. He soon discovered the cruising scene in Pershing Square, where he met Champ Simmons, a man who had been a lover of one of Gerber's Society compatriots. This man told Hay about the Society's brief history, warning Hay of the futility of trying to organize gay men. Although Hay would later deny that he had any knowledge of previous LGBT activism, he was inspired by this knowledge to conceive in 1948 a proposal for a gay men's political and social group. In 1950 Hay's idea reached fruition when he and several other men founded the Mattachine Society, the first enduring LGBT rights organization in the United States.
  Gerber was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1992. The Henry Gerber House, located at 1710 N. Crilly Court, Chicago, contains the apartment in which Gerber lived when he founded the Society. It was designated a Chicago Landmark on June 1, 2001. In June 2015 it was named a National Historic Landmark.
  The Gerber/Hart Library at 6500 N. Clark St in Chicago is named in honor of Gerber and early civil rights defender Pearl M. Hart.
caption: the 1700 block of Crilly Court, in Chicago
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